HENRY V.

New Zealand Listener, Volume 13, Issue 332, 2 November 1945, Page 18

HENRY V.

(Two Cities)

ELL, here it is-and quite as good as overseas reports had led me to expect. But Henry V. is more than

merely good; it is also important: certainly one of the most important British films of the past ten years, and »perhaps one of the most important ever made by any country. It opens up new vistas of achievement for the motion-picture, suggesting that much dramatic material hitherto considered far outside the cinema’s scope should now be regarded as being within the possibility of successful presentation to the movies’ world-wide audience. In brief, Henry V. is one of those miracles that restore one’s faith in the cinema. At the same time, it is not a miracle that we should expect to be repeated in a hurry, for the film must have cost an English fortune to produce, with its galaxy of stage stars, its rich colouring and lavish costuming, its spectacular Agincourt sequence, and its elaborately stylised period settings (after the manner of 15th century tapestries). You will possibly have a new understanding and appreciation of Shakespeare after seeing it, for his language comes to life as well as his characters and situations. This play is by no means Shakespeare's best, either in form or content, yet the blank verse.is so beautifully and so effectively spoken by almost every single member of the cast that I think those who have hitherto known Shakespeare only through the school-room, or perhaps through the Allan Wilkie company and repertory performances, will be surprised to discover how easy it is to follow the dialogue and how full of ‘meaning it is. ae * * HIS is not to suggest that any unwarranted process of "simplification" has taken place. Alan Dent, who edited the text fog the screen play, has taken no liberties which will annoy the Shakespearean purists, except perhaps by introducing one speech from the Second Part of Henry IV. for the deathbed scene of Sir John Falstaff (played by George Robey). But this. is an effective and moving sequence, and I think justifiable on that ground alone. Apart from this, there is nothing in Henry V. that Shakespeare did not write for it (you may be surprised to find that he wrote so much French, and also that he included so Many stage directions in the text), though this doesn’t mean that everything he did write has been put into the film. Since the production even now runs for two hours and 16 minutes, some condensation was essential and the cutting has been so judicious that nothing really vital has been lost, except perhaps one aspect of King Henry himself. As presented with great vigour but rather selfconsciously by Laurence Olivier, here is

Henry in all his royal splendour; a "lovely bully" of a man, strong in courage and humanity. Yet as Shakespeare drew him, still with admiration, Henry could also be cruel and ruthless, as witness his speech threatening the town of Harfleur with frightful consequences if it did not submit to his army, and his orders to the English at Agincourt to kill their prisoners when the French: rallied for a new attack. By cutting these two speeches, as well as the Scroop conspiracy against the king (which admittedly is not otherwise very importapt), the editor has thrown the character of Henry: just a little out of focus. a * ok ()RDINARILY I have not much sympathy with those writers who, in describing stage plays or the film versions of stage plays, announce with rapture that "if only the author could see what has been done to his ¢reation he would certainly approve, etc." I am pretty sure that if Shakespeare could see what some other film producers have done to his work he would say things about them which would make the fiercest diatribes in his plays sound like nursery rhymes by comparison. But in this case I think the assumption might be justified and that Shakespeare would probably approve heartily of the vast scope, the panoramic sweep of action, that the unrestricted camera here gives to his play. For in Henry V. particularly, Shakespeare constantly bemoaned the limitations of the contemporary theatre which, for the Battle of Agincourt, restricted him to "four or five most vile and ragged foils." His appeal to the onlooker to use his imagination-to "eke out our performance with your mind’"-is voiced in every part of the play through the mouth of Chorus (enacted in the film by Leslie Banks): "Grapple your minds to sternage of this navy"; "Entertain conjecture of a time"; "Work, work your thoughts"; "Suppose that you have seen....," etc. Well, these are lazy days; we do not need imaginations of Elizabethan calibre now that we have the movie camera to work for us. The camera can, in very fact, "into a thousand parts divide one man," so that, in the Agincourt sequence, we do not have to be content with a "brawl ridiculous" between those "four or five most vile and ragged foils," but we see instead very nearly the most ex-: citing battle the screen has ever presented (second only, I suggest, to the battle on the ice in Alexander Nevsky). "Think (cries Chorus), when we talk of horses, that you see them printing their proud hoofs i’ the receiving earth." The appeal is superfluous, for there, beyond doubt, are the horses; there are the French knights astride them, advancing at the gallop towards the meagre ranks of English bowmen. And then the singing flight of the arrows, the clash and (continued on next page)

(continued from previous page) flurry of combat, the "alarums and excursions," the confused comings and goings-so confused, indeed, that I think medieval warfare, so different from modern warfare in so many other ways, must have been very similar to it in this; that it is almost impossible for the onlooker to tell who is on whose side. In this respect I found Laurence Olivier’s Battle for France quite as bewildering as Errol Flynn’s Battle for Burma: so much so, in fact, that until Fluellen indignantly explained the situation, I was under the impression that this play’s medieval equivalent of an "atrocity"the slaughter of the camp-boys by the Frehch--was nothing more than a clever infiltration tactic by the English! Apart from this, however, . medieval warfare seems to have been, on the aristocratic level anyway, as polite and sporting as it was spectacular: you had to be quite sure that the other chap wasn’t prepared to ransom himself and, failing this, that he was quite ready to fight before’ the heralds said, in almost those words, "Let battle commence!" These parleys between the French and the English, the councils-of-war in both camps, and the trotting back and forth of the French herald, Montjoy (excellently done by Ralph Truman), constitute some of the most satisfactory parts of the whole very satisfactory film. ele ah

~ be ag! 7 LL these spectacles, all this pictorial beauty of setting, backcloth, and costume, make Henry V. as much a delight for the eye as the impeccable diction of the players, speaking Shakespeare’s linés, makes it a delight for the ear. This is no small achievement, since the * usual tendency when verse is presented on the screen is for the poetry to suffer for the sake of the picture: it is difficult to appreciate both simultaneously. In Henry V., however, a variety of ingenious devices surmount this problem. When the speech is all-important, the camera largely effaces itself: as, for example, in that magnificent soliloquy spoken by Henry on the eve of battle. Here again one feels that Shakespeare himself might have warmly approved; but whether he would or not, a modern audience is always conscious of the absurdity of having an actor go off into a corner to talk to himself in a voice loud enough for the people out front to hear every word, while those on the stage supposedly remain completely oblivious to what he is saying. The theatre can never overcome the artificiality of the soliloquy and the aside, but the camera can, and does in this sequence, by treating the soliloquy as genuinely "unspoken thought," letting us hear the words without seeing the actor’s lips move.

Again, in the St. Crispin’s Day speech and in the sequence where Henry woos Katharine (with Renee Asherson giving a delicious performance as the French princess), the camera holds single shots for much logger than is customary, so that one’s attention is not distracted from the words. On the other hand, where the dialogue is less important, the cameraman is given a much freer hand, and so are the players. That long early speech in which the Archbishop of Canterbury expounds the Salic Law would, indeed;

be not merely boring but almost incomprehensible to a modern movie audience (and so would some of the comic bits with Pistol, Bardolph, and Nym), if the players were not allowed greater licence than on the stage, and if the. camera did not aid and abet their foolery. OU should go to see Henry V. prepared for a treat, but you should also go prepared for a few surprises: the fact, for example, that the first part of the film is a re-creation of the play as it would have been performed in Elizabethan times at the Globe Theatte, with the audience on three sides of the tiny stage and joining in the fun. My own reaction to the first sight of a human figure in the film-the man who Hoists the flag to the Globe’s masthead-was one of distinct disappointment. I thought, "Somebody in very obvious fancy dress." But as you watch the actors playing to the gallery, while the groundlings join in with comments and applause, and as you get an occasional glimpse of the cast | tumbling over one another in their communal dressing-room, the initial feeling of surprise (and possibly of disappoint- ment) wears off. By Act. III. the pretence that you are attending an Elizabethan stage performance has wholly disappeared; the action is no longer confined "within the girdle of these walls"; we are in the realm of the cinema much more than of the theatre. And yet the effect of that novel introduction has been to emphasise the stage origins of the film and so to give added point and interest to the Shakespearean yerse. * * Ps

OWEVER, although a new storehouse of dramatic material would now seem to be opened to us by the successful filming of Henry V. I think there will always be limitations to what the screen can accomplish with Shakespeare, even when you have for director and producer a man as much in love with his subject as Laurence Olivier. You may overcome the restrictions and artificiality of the stage, but the theatre still remains essentially a place for talk and the screen a place for action and realism. It is no accident, I believe, that the most effective portions of Henry V. are those showing the Battle of Agincourt. These are pure cinema, containing no spoken words, but only a stirring musical accompaniment by William Walton. All the same, Henry V, is a daring experiment in more ways than one, and in more ways than one it succeeds magnificently. I have little doubt in my mind now about what film to name as the best of 1945.